Queer Rebels presents SPIRIT: Queer Asian, Arab, and Pacific Islander Artivism. A rainbow of rabble-rousers. From the Arab Spring to Angel Island to Third World Liberation, these untold queer stories spring to life. Come see fresh performance and film/video from Asian, Arab, and Pacific Islanders artivists! Facebook invite

“a new and ripe realm for building power, community, and visibility” – Bitch Magazine

Bellows is a queer bay-area-native drag performance duo, featuring songwriter, Kyle Casey Chu on vocals, and Rachel Waterhouse on keys. Their murder ballad sound has been likened to that
of Rufus Wainwright, Elton John and the late Freddie Mercury. They are committed to harping on their exes, publicly shaming gaycist queens and airing out only their moistest, most stinkiest laundry.

Elena Rose, a Filipina-Ashkenazic mixed-class trans dyke mestiza, is a writer, religion scholar, medic, and survivor from rural Oregon. Dedicated to the projects of radical love, community building, and media justice, she writes online as “little light” at http://takingsteps.blogspot.com. She co-curates and headlines the five-years-running National Queer Arts Festival production, Girl Talk: A Cis and Trans Woman Dialogue. Her writing has found its way everywhere from law school classrooms and academic conferences to bathroom mirrors and protest marches. Rose currently resides in northern California, where she studies, organizes, and stays busy being in good stories; she carries a pen, her ancestors, and the mismatched ID of a citizen of the borderlands with her at all times.

Genevieve Erin O’Brien is a Vietnamese/Irish/American artist, culinary adventurer, community organizer, popular educator, incidental academic and occasional nanny to artists, activists, and academics alike. She holds an MFA in Studio Art/Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. O’Brien was in Vietnam as a Fulbright Fellow in 2009 and 2010. O’Brien uses performance, video and installation to explore notions of “home” and “homeland”. As a mixed race child of Vietnamese immigrant mother and an Irish-American father, she investigates issues such as war and memory, transnational identity and belonging, and multiple identities and its attendant baggage. Using food, humor, narrative and conceptual structures, she develops work that is invested in collective healing from trauma, whether personal or inherited to further social justice and cultural understanding. Her conceptual and durational performances, as well as installations and videos have been presented at galleries and public venues in numerous cities including Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and across the US in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC. Her current performance series GEO Home and GEO work, explore the relationships we have to home and labor through food.

Heaven Mousalem is a dancer and performing artist trained in Modern Arabic Stage Style™ by the legendary Shabnam of Oakland, CA. She performs weekly throughout the Bay Area and is the Executive Director of Ooh La La Bellydance and Shabnam Dance Company. Known for her dynamic movements, flexibility, and charisma, she hopes to bring a greater appreciation of this often misunderstood art form to her audience. Shimmy on! http://www.heavenbellydancer.com

Maryam Farnaz Rostami is a San Francisco-based contemporary performance artist, director, and writer originally from Texas. She is the child of model minorities. She uses lipsync, movement,narrative, dance and an exaggerated high femme medium to play, destroy and create. Maryam is a co-founder of the performance experiment Nicole Kidman is Fucking Gorgeous, which played winter 2013 at CounterPULSE, and her last evening length piece, PERSIAN LOOKING, played at CounterPULSE in the summer of 2012. She has played at ZSpace, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the De Young Museum, The Garage, The Stud, the Dana Street Theater, La Pena Theater, Root Division Gallery and Catherine Clarke Gallery. maryamrostami.com

KB Boyce is a Two-Spirit musician whose adventures have brought hir from teenage punk band appearances at CBGBs in NY, to B-grade horror movies in LA, and on to solo Drag King blues performance as TuffNStuff in San Francisco. S/he pays homage to African-American and Indigenous legacies of resistance through art. Boyce is the Co-Founder of Queer Rebels, a queer people of color arts company that connects generations – and honors our queer legacies with art for the future. www.queerrebels.com

Celeste Chan creates work born from Queer Diaspora through wit, words, and film. A Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) literary fellow, her writing is published in As/us literary journal and Feminist Wire. Her films have screened at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, MIX NYC, Frameline, and National Queer Arts Festival, among others. She’s honored to be the Co-Founder of Queer Rebels (a queer of color arts company), with her partner, KB Boyce. For more info: www.celestechan.com and www.facebook.com/QRProductions

Ryka Aoki has been honored by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to free speech and artistic expression, as well as the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.” Her chapbook Sometimes Too Hot the Eye of Heaven Shines, won RADAR Productions’ 2010 Eli Coppola Award. Her collection, Seasonal Velocities was a finalist for a 2013 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her novel, He Mele a Hilo (Topside Signature Press) is being released as you read this. Ryka also appears in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (Seal Press), Transfeminist Perspectives (Temple University), and The Collection (Topside Press). She is a professor of English at Santa Monica College and coordinates the Queer Studies program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. www.rykaryka.com

Celeste Chan is an Asian artivist and queer femme (you read that right). Her writing can be found in As/us literary journal and Feminist Wire. Her films have screened at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, MIX NYC, Frameline, Digital Desperados, and National Queer Arts Festival, among others. She’s honored to be the Co-Founder of Queer Rebels (a queer of color arts company), with her partner, KB Boyce. You can catch her new work in 2014 at CAAMFest (formerly known as SF Intl Asian American Film Festival), Queer Women of Color Film Festival, the San Francisco Public Library and beyond! For more info: www.celestechan.com and www.facebook.com/QRProductions

Devyn Manibo is a full time diva and East Coast based interdisciplinary artist working primarily in multi-media installation with a basis in diasporic affect, kinship, and queer narratives of home and trauma through a postcolonial/neocolonial lens. She creates and collaborates as a means of cultivating space for resistance, survival, and love for and by her communities. She believes in femme supremacy, and has a love for extravagance and the illusion of lavish. She can usually be found race raging, shade bending, and averting your settler colonialist gaze with a resting glare of displeasure.

Gein Wong is an interdisciplinary director, playwright, spoken word poet, composer and video artist. Her works focus on obvious things like gender, class and race….as well as things a little less obvious, like gender, class and race. She is a 2012-13 Canadian Stage RBC BASH Director in Residence, a 2013 Harbourfront Centre HATCH Resident Artist, a two-time Philadelphia Asian Arts Initiative Resident Artist and is collaborating on a New York HERE Arts Centre Residency. She was shortlisted for the Ontario KM Hunter Theatre Awards in Theatre (2010) and Literature (2013). Her art have been shown and performed across Canada, in the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, East Asia and the United States. She is published in the Playwrights Canada Press Anthology Refractions Solo and is a featured artist in Diaspora Dialogues’ 5th Anniversary Commemorative Book. Gein is a New York Kundiman Poetry fellow and is featured on the Dig Your Roots Canadian Spoken Word CD. She has released two CDs Thousand Mile Voice and Burning Money for You which are a warm and distinctive blend of East Asian acoustic instruments and electronic brushed beats. She is classically trained in piano and french horn and has trained with the erhu (Chinese violin) virtuoso Shao Lin. Gein is the Artistic Director of Eventual Ashes, the Asian Arts Freedom School and a co-owner of the Gladday Bookshop. http://www.geinwong.com

Jeepneys is the musical and performance alias of Anna Luisa Petrisko, who uses science fiction in her work to broaden our imagination across literal and figurative borders and perform postcolonial critique. Jeepneys is named after the colorful and iconic public transportation vehicles that populate the Philippine islands, originating from discarded U.S. WWII army jeeps. In the spirit of that reinvention, Jeepneys uses earthly materials to create otherworldly sounds and art, manifesting “electro Pinayism waves” that travel beyond our known borders. She is constantly traveling through space, seeking the wisdom of the cosmos, and exploring the infinite possibilities to heal through art and music.

Jeepneys has exhibited at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) and MOMA PS1, and was one of the artists commissioned to perform for The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: LA Modern Architecture. She has toured the United States and Europe as a solo performer (Jeepneys) several times. She is also one half of the performance and installation duet Mother Popcorn, along with artist Adee Roberson, and a member of an all women of color artist group, Black Salt Collective. She resides in Val Verde, CA, where she spends much of her time star-gazing and listening to the songs of the coyotes and owls.

Kirthi Nath makes films that seem spun from dreams. As an award-winning independent filmmaker, Kirthi has established a body of creative work that fluidly straddles genres, occupying a fertile landscape of cultural poetics, experimentalism, documentary and hybrid narrative. Tactile and dreamlike, her work explores storytelling, desire, spirituality, cultural identities and moments of being. Current projects include a series of multimedia projects about magical messages, creative presence and modern day mindfulness. In addition to her own artistic work, Kirthi is the creative director and lead filmmaker at Cinemagical Media, a media production company that collaborates with social entrepreneurs, values based companies and nonprofits to create films and movements for our evolving culture. www.cinemagicalmedia.com

Laura Hyunjhee Kim is an interdisciplinary artist who performs, makes videos and collages digital images. She embraces absurdity and takes deep pleasure in surfacing the disjuncture in language, sound and movement. Her recent works have been subjected to her “It’s Complicated” love and hate relationship with the Internet. More: lauraonsale.com

Riko Fluchel is a 23 year old graduate of Hampshire College, where he studied Queer FIlipin@ Studies, Creative Writing, and a dash of film/performance. His theoretical and artistic work explores temporality, postcolonialism, melancholy, feminist political philosophy, haunting, and all the pain and beauty of diasporic experience and identity. His goal is to one day become a community accountable scholar and artist. He currently lives in Oakland, CA.